Lewis has had to make a great many assumptions to write the book, because if he hadn't the thing would be the size of a library. But let me back up for purposes of this conversation and undo two assumptions: 1) That all modern technology will necessarily decay away post-apocalypse. And 2) That all technology HAS to necessarily decay away on the recovery timescales discussed in the book.

Let me unwind the second assumption first. We tend to think of our modern contrivances and gizmos as disposable, and to some extent they are. I've been through 6 cell phones in 10 years, I have 3 tablets and 4 computers currently in use, and I have no expectation that any of it will be usable in 10-15 years, let alone actually used. Those devices, though, are a product of a certain market and design ethic. We as a global community have demanded cheap, powerful electronics and the shiny toys they underpin. The market has responded with semi-disposable gear of all kinds.

But what if the chief requirements of an IT architecture were not cheapness and power, but reliability and longevity? Could we build an IT system / architecture that could run continuously for decades with 99.999% reliability, and be powered down for centuries and still be rebootable? Could we build a storage capacity in an IT system to reliably store, say, 10-100 TB of information in a non-volatile format for 1,000 years? Think miniaturized magnetic core random access memory, but on steroids. Can I make a microprocessor (even a macroprocessor) that can survive and operate after centuries of being turned off? Remember, running the graphics performance of the latest FPS game is NOT a requirement. I need to serve information to an interface / interaction device at about the rate a human can comprehend it, so the latest 802.11 chipsets and GPUs are wasted on this project. And can I build a simple foolproof interface device that can survive for centuries?

Not to belabor the point, but I think if we thought about the requirements correctly we could build (and proliferate) IT systems that could last a heck of a long time, and store a very large amount of insanely detailed and useful information.

Are there current systems in what we might call the mainstream IT world that can last? I've been trying to ask this question with regard to DVD storage, and that led me to the Taiyo Yuden CD/DVD solution. These things, and some competitor products, are supposed to last 100-300 years. Gold layers and special dyes are supposed to be the trick. I imagine you can expand their longevity even further through very careful climate control, and UV exposure and oxygen exposure control. They may go substantially longer if you store them in the dark, in cotton sleeves, in a nitrogen atmosphere. What about the players? They are probably the weak link, as is their dependence on electricity. But maybe simple improvements to the players could radically expand their useful lives (i.e. get rid of all nylon gearing in the mechanisms!)

Bottom line is that we may already have some IT technology out there with some longevity and storage capacity, and we could certainly specially-build IT systems for reliability and longevity, and scatter them around the planet.

Great, and very thoughtful post, thanks. I wonder if there might be a better alternative to a gold-coated DVD for ultra-long-term storage of data. How reliable/stable is something like solid-state memory such as in a USB fob or MacBook Air hard disk? Could you build a large capacity data storage facility that's essentially a huge chunk of ROM, do you know. It could be pre-loaded with vital texts and manuals, or even some kind of reboot programme that guides a post-collapse society step-by-step through the recovery

Was pondering the question "How to store information for future generations?" and I know my last suggestion was low-tech, but upon revisiting the question - and reading the various suggestions and ideas, they all seem to pivot on the idea of having electric power available or a dedicated technology to read the information on a storage device...

Which got me thinking. Why do we even need a power source or a "reader" in the first place? There is no guarantee that electric power will be available at all.

When the ancients wanted to pass on information, they carved it into durable stone, like granite. They used the bones of the earth to record important information. So, why not take a page from their book of ideas?

I asked myself "What is durable - durable enough to survive a long time that you can combine with something simple - like sunlight - that will allow information to be not only recorded, but easily read by those in the future?"

You all know how lasers are used to serial number diamonds, burning the numbers into the edge of a diamond? Too small to see with the naked eye? Well, why not get some smart guys together (like our good Doc... he's got to know people) and figure out a way to use our current laser tech, industrial diamond tech and sunlight to pass on information?

Diamonds are just carbon atoms in crystal form. We make them all the time, along with a bunch of other gemstones. A cut gemstone plays with light to make it pretty, right? Refraction, reflection, splitting the visible light spectrum into colors, etc.

I'm betting we can make an industrial diamond big enough to make a lens. I don't know enough about artificial gemstones to know what the size limit is on such things. If it's possible, make them small enough to be portable, but big enough to contain a useful amount of information.

Then use a laser to burn the information into its surface. When held up to sunlight, it would magnify the data large enough to be read easily by anyone with a mind to (at a fixed distance). An image of an old overhead projector gave me the idea, only we could incorporate the data into the stone and use the sun to illuminate it.

So long as nobody chopped them up for jewelry, dropped them in the Mariana Trench or chucked them into a blast furnace, they'd last forever and wouldn't deteriorate. Simple pictographs could show how they worked.

Billy wrote:So long as nobody chopped them up for jewelry, dropped them in the Mariana Trench or chucked them into a blast furnace, they'd last forever and wouldn't deteriorate. Simple pictographs could show how they worked.

Is this a dumb idea or a doable idea?

In an earlier post I suggested 3D printed sapphire as the best material and I would still go with it as it melts at just over 2000C whereas diamonds will burn at about 800C IIRC its just posh coal that scratches things and sapphire is also more chemically resistant in other ways. But the passive magnifying overhead projector idea aspect of your idea I liked and made me think you could build on that some more. How about a lump of sapphire configured as a good magnifying glass that could be used to start fires etc but with a slot or maybe 3 or more slots but one central one passing through the focal point. So that if you also had a sapphire knife fork and spoon set with useful information etched into the handles that you could slide through the focal point. You could even have multiple sets with different information on people with different sets could trade information when civilisation returned but it would be a useful intrinsic set of tools worth keeping and carrying around during the times when a pile of paper books might be used just to keep warm.

Billy wrote:So long as nobody chopped them up for jewelry, dropped them in the Mariana Trench or chucked them into a blast furnace, they'd last forever and wouldn't deteriorate. Simple pictographs could show how they worked.

Is this a dumb idea or a doable idea?

In an earlier post I suggested 3D printed sapphire as the best material and I would still go with it as it melts at just over 2000C whereas diamonds will burn at about 800C IIRC its just posh coal that scratches things and sapphire is also more chemically resistant in other ways. But the passive magnifying overhead projector idea aspect of your idea I liked and made me think you could build on that some more. How about a lump of sapphire configured as a good magnifying glass that could be used to start fires etc but with a slot or maybe 3 or more slots but one central one passing through the focal point. So that if you also had a sapphire knife fork and spoon set with useful information etched into the handles that you could slide through the focal point. You could even have multiple sets with different information on people with different sets could trade information when civilisation returned but it would be a useful intrinsic set of tools worth keeping and carrying around during the times when a pile of paper books might be used just to keep warm.

Okay, after doing all of an hour's research on man-made sapphire, I tend to agree with you. What I found interesting - and what caused me to side with you - is that watch crystals are made from man-made clear sapphire, which would obviously mean that you can make lenses from them if you wanted to. Big ones.

While I think it's cool - your idea of being able to change the information shown by changing out different dedicated modules - that would still mean that the modules themselves could become lost or damaged and that the lens was still a dedicated "reader". Moreso if the dedicated module had another dedicated, more mundane purpose. Like a fork. If it's your only fork, then it's going to get a lot of use. Lots of use (in my mind) equals more opportunity for damage and/or theft or loss.

I was thinking of the gear the old time traveling optometrist used - a case with multiple lenses and a set of adjustable frames, where you could swap out the lenses. Only in this case, there would be no frames to lose. Just a case with multiples of lenses in it. The case could be made of something relatively stable and strong - like titanium - and each lens could have it's own slot, marked with a unique number or symbol that would also be marked on the lens that's supposed to go there. Instructions on use could be simple pictographs deeply engraved on the inside lid of the case.

The trick would be to make a lens big enough to hold a meaningful amount of information - even if it's engraved in tiny script. Also, we'd need an expert on the physics of light and optical lenses to design a lens that wouldn't invert the image, would magnify the information an acceptable amount so that it could be read with the unaided eye and do so at a reasonable distance. Say, holding the lens up to the sun at shoulder height would cause the information to be readable at a distance of 5 or 6 feet.

No idea if this is doable. This involves crunching numbers that are outside my sphere of experience...

Billy wrote:While I think it's cool - your idea of being able to change the information shown by changing out different dedicated modules - that would still mean that the modules themselves could become lost or damaged and that the lens was still a dedicated "reader". Moreso if the dedicated module had another dedicated, more mundane purpose. Like a fork. If it's your only fork, then it's going to get a lot of use. Lots of use (in my mind) equals more opportunity for damage and/or theft or loss.

I was thinking of the gear the old time traveling optometrist used - a case with multiple lenses and a set of adjustable frames, where you could swap out the lenses. Only in this case, there would be no frames to lose. Just a case with multiples of lenses in it. The case could be made of something relatively stable and strong - like titanium - and each lens could have it's own slot, marked with a unique number or symbol that would also be marked on the lens that's supposed to go there. Instructions on use could be simple pictographs deeply engraved on the inside lid of the case.

The trick would be to make a lens big enough to hold a meaningful amount of information - even if it's engraved in tiny script. Also, we'd need an expert on the physics of light and optical lenses to design a lens that wouldn't invert the image, would magnify the information an acceptable amount so that it could be read with the unaided eye and do so at a reasonable distance. Say, holding the lens up to the sun at shoulder height would cause the information to be readable at a distance of 5 or 6 feet.

No idea if this is doable. This involves crunching numbers that are outside my sphere of experience...

Me I like tools with multiple uses like the Swiss army knife whilst I have never removed a boy scout from a horse hoof I think I did once use that sub tool for another purpose and because the knife is often useful I keep it available and know where it is. Expensively safe guarding information long term when at the moment it is a cheap and easily available commodity is a big ask for most people. But something that could be useful on a camping trip and is designed to last with secondary what if aspects might be bought into at least at the luxury end of the market. To me one primary lens that also has fire-lighting and other magnifying properties would be a more efficient use of mass less of a luxury to carry around. But your system does have the advantage of some redundancy in that you could lose some crystals and not lose access to all your data in one go. As to if it is doable the proof of principle is that overhead projectors and artificial sapphires do exist so it could be done its just an engineering problem as they say. Whether it could be done at a price some or enough people would be willing to pay is another question.

Billy wrote:While I think it's cool - your idea of being able to change the information shown by changing out different dedicated modules - that would still mean that the modules themselves could become lost or damaged and that the lens was still a dedicated "reader". Moreso if the dedicated module had another dedicated, more mundane purpose. Like a fork. If it's your only fork, then it's going to get a lot of use. Lots of use (in my mind) equals more opportunity for damage and/or theft or loss.

I was thinking of the gear the old time traveling optometrist used - a case with multiple lenses and a set of adjustable frames, where you could swap out the lenses. Only in this case, there would be no frames to lose. Just a case with multiples of lenses in it. The case could be made of something relatively stable and strong - like titanium - and each lens could have it's own slot, marked with a unique number or symbol that would also be marked on the lens that's supposed to go there. Instructions on use could be simple pictographs deeply engraved on the inside lid of the case.

The trick would be to make a lens big enough to hold a meaningful amount of information - even if it's engraved in tiny script. Also, we'd need an expert on the physics of light and optical lenses to design a lens that wouldn't invert the image, would magnify the information an acceptable amount so that it could be read with the unaided eye and do so at a reasonable distance. Say, holding the lens up to the sun at shoulder height would cause the information to be readable at a distance of 5 or 6 feet.

No idea if this is doable. This involves crunching numbers that are outside my sphere of experience...

Me I like tools with multiple uses like the Swiss army knife whilst I have never removed a boy scout from a horse hoof I think I did once use that sub tool for another purpose and because the knife is often useful I keep it available and know where it is. Expensively safe guarding information long term when at the moment it is a cheap and easily available commodity is a big ask for most people. But something that could be useful on a camping trip and is designed to last with secondary what if aspects might be bought into at least at the luxury end of the market. To me one primary lens that also has fire-lighting and other magnifying properties would be a more efficient use of mass less of a luxury to carry around. But your system does have the advantage of some redundancy in that you could lose some crystals and not lose access to all your data in one go. As to if it is doable the proof of principle is that overhead projectors and artificial sapphires do exist so it could be done its just an engineering problem as they say. Whether it could be done at a price some or enough people would be willing to pay is another question.

Ahh, I see where the problem is now. We're talking about apples and motorcycles... two entirely different animals.

I was thinking "How could we use existing technology so that we could preserve the most important information as long as possible".

You're thinking of "How can we use existing technology to cram information into something that people will buy on the open market." (Assuming your goal is to spread as much information over as wide an area as possible).

See, the problem as I see it is that whatever you own, you don't really own that. Not really. Yes, you possess it for while you are on this earth, and hopefully take care of it so it is passed down to someone else, but not to get all Zen or Kung Foo-ey on you, in the end we're just temporary caretakers of "stuff"...

If some great calamity befalls humanity in the future, then there should be a repository of knowledge somewhere - or several somewheres - that folks can access. Skellig Michael comes to mind. Considered so marginal by invading armies, it was never conquered. But, it held a king's ransom of knowledge from the ancient world, preserved by the monks.

If you're making one set to contain as much knowledge as possible, the first is always the hardest. Subsequent sets get easier to make. So, instead of just one set, make a dozen or so in different languages and scatter them across the globe.

But, I see a problem. And I will address this problem in a separate post... hopefully Doc will respond...

Hello all,may i put the material porcellan(?) to the debate?Of course, it is easily splittered into pieces,but has some good aspects:

- it is waterproof- it survives ordinary fire- on the white underground you can print very detailed graphics in all brilliant coloures,- you can form it to useful things like dishes and plates,- you can make little 3-D Models from whatever you want,- porcellan mass fabrication in asia is not expensive!- the finder in a future era will not need any technical pre-knowing or equipment for to see and understand it.

I imagine a serie of porcellan dishes with exzellent pictures of vegetables and animals,and with recepts how to grow/breed, conserve and prepare them for meals, like a comic strip.The texts could be in two or three languages, this may be the "stone of rosette" for the future. It should be possible to produce this for an attractive price and spread over the world,saving fundamental knowledge about farming, gardening and cooking.

Billy wrote:Ahh, I see where the problem is now. We're talking about apples and motorcycles... two entirely different animals.

I was thinking "How could we use existing technology so that we could preserve the most important information as long as possible".

You're thinking of "How can we use existing technology to cram information into something that people will buy on the open market." (Assuming your goal is to spread as much information over as wide an area as possible).

See, the problem as I see it is that whatever you own, you don't really own that. Not really. Yes, you possess it for while you are on this earth, and hopefully take care of it so it is passed down to someone else, but not to get all Zen or Kung Foo-ey on you, in the end we're just temporary caretakers of "stuff"...

I thought with your "travelling optometry case" you were also suggesting the more important quick reboot information and not the full Library Of Civilisations Knowledge(LOCK which paradoxically only useful if unlocked ). For a full system I made suggestions in the thread viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1713 which i think might be able to be made portable if nanotech gets advanced enough before a fall.

Billy wrote:If some great calamity befalls humanity in the future, then there should be a repository of knowledge somewhere - or several somewheres - that folks can access. Skellig Michael comes to mind. Considered so marginal by invading armies, it was never conquered. But, it held a king's ransom of knowledge from the ancient world, preserved by the monks.

If you're making one set to contain as much knowledge as possible, the first is always the hardest. Subsequent sets get easier to make. So, instead of just one set, make a dozen or so in different languages and scatter them across the globe.

But, I see a problem. And I will address this problem in a separate post... hopefully Doc will respond...

B

I think one place to put such a complete store of knowledge might be the south pole as its a place that humans or our inheritors might visit out of curiosity at a stage when a new proto civilisation might appreciate a big input of knowledge.

If we are to travel to other worlds (my theme in all of this) then longevity of technology is absolutely key. The Japanese took us a long way wrt reliability when they started talking about defective parts per million rather than the hundred as we were used to not that many years ago. Now we need to be thinking about lifetimes of many hundreds if not thousands of years to enable us to build a world from scratch on some far away world.Regards